


mo anam cara

by Merideath



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Anxiety, Awkwardness, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Depression, F/M, Introverts, Post-Avengers (2012), Soulmate September 2019, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, minor background violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 11:15:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20674481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merideath/pseuds/Merideath
Summary: As long as Darcy kept her mouth shut whenever their small circles collided she didn’t have to know if he was or wasn’t her soulmate.





	mo anam cara

**Author's Note:**

> My attempt at a soulmate fic for Soulmate September 2019. Although the fic is mostly lighthearted there are mentions of Darcy’s more anxious depression based thoughts. Brain goblins are the worst but just because we have them doesn’t mean we don’t deserve love of any kind even when we struggle to love ourselves. Believe me I know that struggle well.
> 
> Thanks littleplebe for the wonderful beta job. All other mistakes are my own.

She’s not hiding. Not really. Just sort of skirting the edges of the party, finding the best possible escape routes. It’s a perfectly legit thing to do when dealing with potential mad scientists and a handful of earth-based heroes. 

Technically, she’s abandoning her post as Jane’s handmaiden or whatever. But standing beside the astrophysicist while she science babbled with Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner is a purgatory Darcy isn’t paid for. Not that she’s paid for anything that she does. Unpaid internships for the win. Yeah, no, not really.

Darcy scrunches up her nose at the uncharitable turn of her thoughts. She loves Jane and is certain she will follow her to the end of the universe over the Bifrost and back again. She’s already followed Jane across the desert, faced down a flaming robot, and got shuffled around by Jack-Booted Thugs to Norway during the Battle of New York a few months back, but somehow being stuck at a glitzy party in the Stark Mansion feels worse somehow.

Introvert problems.

She grumbles to herself as she smooths down the skirt of her sweater dress. It’s a dark plum that fits over Darcy’s figure without squeezing the life out of her. She’s wearing a hammered metal half-moon brooch over her left breast that hides an oil stain.

Darcy scans over the crowd and tucks herself a little deeper into the shadowy corner of the room. Wedging her shoulder against one of the decorative columns, she opens her purse and pulls out her e-reader. She’s deep into the Prose Edda when she surfaces enough to notice her little refuge has been intruded upon. 

Leaning against the opposite column is a man with dark blonde hair, scribbling in a Moleskine with a stubby pencil. His brows drawn together, mouth set in a thin line, and shoulders tense in his expensive grey suit. He’s beautiful. His blue eyes snap up to meet hers and there is something wary swimming in their depths.

His eyes flick out to the party and back to Darcy. It takes her a moment to get it. He’s asking permission to stay hidden in the shadows with her. Darcy nods slowly and the man flashes her a smile, his shoulders relaxing. A small smile slips across Darcy’s lips and she tilts her head back down to her e-reader. 

Twenty minutes fly by as they share their quiet corner together. Twice they share smiles between them as the party fades away to a dull roar. Darcy's head is filled with Icelandic prose, the words forming silently on her lips as she reads. Each time Grey Suit looks her way, her heart beats faster and she’s tempted to break the comfortable silence between them.

The low murmur of the party breaks like a wave and Grey Suit pulls away from the column, back arrow-straight and intense focus off to the left of the room. Darcy follows his gaze to see a furious Jane Foster waving her hands at an amused looking Tony Stark. They’re too far away to hear what Tony says, but Grey Suit winces.

_“Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón,”_ he says softly, mouth twisting up in a wry smile. 

Darcy says nothing at all. 

She can’t. His words chase around in her head and slip down the curve of her spine to light up the letters scrawled across her skin in a distinctly messy scrawl.

He flips the Moleskine close, tucking it and the stubby pencil into a jacket pocket. His chin juts out to the room and Darcy’s gaze follows in time to catch Jane smashing a tiny fist into Tony’s face. 

_Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón._

Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose.

_Oh, no._

There’s a glitch in her brain. All the things she thought she would say, words and words and words sit frozen on her tongue. Frozen like the icy feel of the words etched down her spine. The words felt like frost on her skin for years until a few days after the whole New Mexico desert Norse God from space thing. The mark radiated warmth down her spine, like holding a hot cup of coffee on a cool morning or sitting like a cat in a beam of afternoon sunshine.

The words feel just as warm now. A caress down her spine, heat radiating out over her skin and down to settle in her bones.

_Oh, no._

She glances back and forth between Jane and her soulmate. Long seconds drag out like some sort of horror movie before Darcy wrinkles her nose as she frantically shoves her e-reader away. Her feet are moving before her brain can catch up, shoving through the crowd to take her place at Jane’s side. 

Stark’s holding a napkin up to his nose when Darcy skids across the floor to Jane’s side. The astrophysicist is hissing like an angry cat.

“Jane?”

“I’m fine, Darcy, let’s go home,” Jane snarls.

“Um, okay, but where? We’re kinda guests and broke.”

“What’d you do now, Stark?” the man with the notebook asks. His voice cracks with authority and none of the wry humor it held when he spoke her words. 

Darcy’s mouth drops open but no words form on her tongue. She lifts her hand to cover her mouth, afraid that any words spoken now would somehow ruin the quiet moment they had shared in the shadows. 

“Me?” Mr. Stark scoffs. The ‘m’ sounding more like a ‘b’ as he holds the ball of bloody tissue to his nose. “You think this is my fault.”

Her maybe, sorta soulmate doesn’t answer with words but his eyebrows inch up towards his hairline, mouth flattening into a grim line. 

“Tony, no,” a new voice says and Darcy’s heart sorta falters in her chest as Pepper Potts steps into the circle as regal as a queen. The CEO of Stark Industries is wrapped up in a white dress and golden heels that probably cost half the amount of Darcy’s student loans. “I am so sorry, Doctor Foster. Would you like another drink while we discuss funding?”

“Funding?” Jane echoes, shoulders drooping down as Pepper expertly leads her away from Tony Stark and towards the bar. Darcy glances at the man with the notebook and offers up a small smile. His mouth curves up in an answering smile. She feels the warmth of the smile in the pit of her stomach and in the words scrawled down her back.

“Funding for your research into Einstein-Rosen bridges and the possibility of you coming to work for the newly formed Avengers Initiative.”

“I won’t work for Mr. Stark,” Jane asks, the man’s name sounding like something dirty stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

“Of course not. You, Dr Foster and your lovely assistant, would be working for me. Let me show you the schematics for the facility we’re building upstate.”

“The Avengers Initiative,” Darcy asks.

“The tower is still in the process of being refurbished but we have allocated space within the new facility for laboratories. There is also a small cottage on the grounds with excellent views of the night sky.”

…

Soulmarks show up more or less at puberty. Darcy’s bloomed across her skin when she was fourteen. At the time she’d been obsessed with kohl eyeliner, her first iPod, and computer coding. 

Eight words in Gaeilge, Irish Gaelic, so cold they burned. 

It’s no surprise that her words are in another language. It was almost expected with the way Darcy picked up every language she heard like a child stuffing their pockets with pebbles at the beach. She’d been desperately trying to talk her parents into letting her attend courses in Mandarin, Sokovian, and Latin at the Junior College across town when her words bit into the skin along her spine. 

The only language that stumped Darcy was Thor’s All-Speak. The words didn’t sound right in her head like all the syllables were spoken correctly but the order reversed and jumbled up and fit back together when they hit the language center of the brain. 

What is a surprise however is the identity of her maybe soulmate. It’s not that the man who said her words is Captain America it’s the way her brain shuts down at the potential. There’s a bitter seed in Darcy’s mind that sours so many thoughts and despite knowing that Steve Rogers is a man like any other person her brain twists things up. Nasty little thoughts swirl about in her head, that he isn’t the one. That it’s all some sort of cosmic joke that someone played with an old Irish idiom. God, she’s an idiot. 

It still takes almost a year before Darcy’s ready to see if the words on his skin will match whatever frothy lace of letters that will slip from her tongue.

Schrodinger’s soulmate. As long as Darcy kept her mouth shut whenever their small circles collided she didn’t have to know if he was or wasn’t her soulmate. She didn’t have to know that her brain was telling the truth, that she wasn’t good enough to be his. It was easier that way but not better. Despite the twist of her thoughts, she took strength from knowing she had a soulmate. Knowing that there was someone out there to understand her even with all her jagged edges made it easier to get out of bed in the morning. Maybe Steve took strength from his words too. Even if they weren’t her words.

Her grandmother once told her ‘A soulmate doesn’t always mean love the way you think. It’s not like those trashy books your mother buys from the supermarket or those Disney movies you love. It’s hard work. Meeting a soulmate is a start, but it’s only that. If you want love you need to earn it. Fight for it.’ 

The Avengers had a brutal few weeks; fighting Doom Bots, some sort of furry blue Lovecraftian beastie that decided to whelp its tentacled pups in Coney Island, and the return of Thor with an adolescent Loki dragging his heels behind him. All of which meant Darcy had escaped the cottage, aka Dr. Foster’s lab, and legged it across to the Avengers Training Facility in search of coffee and something to eat that wasn’t a) prepackaged or b) cost money. 

Which of course means she stumbles across Steve Rogers sprawled out on one of the couches in the Avengers lounge reading something on a tablet. He glances up from the tablet, long lashes fluttering as he blinks slowly. A soft smile curves across his lips. “Hey, Darcy. Everything okay with Thor and his, um, brother? ...it is Darcy, right?” he asks.

Everything is fine. Everything is great. She nods once, trying to swallow around the stone in her throat. Her mind scrambles for all the little things she thinks she should say. Book quotes and simple phrases in a dozen languages that flash across her mind. All the bright shiny things crumble apart like dry cake and her stomach knots up with a sudden rush of anxiety. She’s being dumb and he’s so sweet and oh... Goddess Frigga, he’s still talking. 

_“I’m sorry. I was lost in my thoughts,”_ Darcy says before she could stop herself. Before she can jump back onto the train over overthinking every little thing she’s done or said in her entire life.

“What?”

“Uh, I’m sorry?”

“Say that again. All of it.”

“I’m sorry, I was lost in my thoughts,” Darcy repeats herself and then quietly whispers the words on her skin, “Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón. Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose.”

“You never spoke before.” It’s not a question. “At the party when Dr. Foster nearly laid out Tony with a right hook.”

“Yeah, I, yeah,” Darcy says softly. She toys with one of the buttons on her sweater, twisting it back and forth. She struggles to keep her eyes on Steve’s, her focus shifting to the few days growth of beard scruff covering his jaw. 

“Or any of the seventeen times we’ve been in the same room.”

“Seventeen,” Darcy says arching a brow over the top of her glasses frame. 

A faint blush crawls across Steve’s high cheekbones and lights up the tips of his ears. He shifts in his seat, setting the tablet down with exaggerated care and lacing his fingers together as if he’s as anxious as Darcy feels. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” she says softly, her knees feeling watery. Gripping the arm of one of the chairs Darcy sinks down into it. “Okay. I’m sorry. I was scared that you were my soulmate and that you weren’t. Sometimes my brain goes a bit squirrelly and I listen to the bad thoughts more than the hopeful ones. 

“You said the words on my skin and I froze and every time we were in the same room I froze up again. The not knowing seemed safer than the knowing. Which totally irrational, I know, but like whatever. Sorry, sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Steve says. The wrinkle between his brows deepens and he untangles his fingers to reach out towards Darcy. His fingers skim across the back of her hand before he jerks his hand back to flatten over his thigh. “Sorry, didn’t mean to.”

“It’s okay, _anam cara_,” Darcy says a smile stretching across her lips. 

“Soulmate,” Steve says letting out a shaky laugh. “Can I...can I see my words?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” she says rolling her lip between her teeth. It takes two attempts to get up out of the chair and turn her back to Steve. She shoves up the back of her t-shirt and cardigan. “If you just...yanno, lift my shirt up a bit.”

“Can I…,” Steve says voice trailing off at the end.

“Yeah, go ahead,” Darcy says taking a deep breath and holding it. She closes her eyes tight. Steve shifts behind her as he takes hold of the fabric and rucks it up her back revealing more of the words scrawled down her back. He places warm fingertips along her spine tracing the letters out. 

_“Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón,” _ Steve says voice low and reverential. The pads of his fingers bump against Darcy’s bra and trail back down smoothing her shirt and cardigan with it. “My Ma used to say that about me.”

“Troublemaker?” Darcy asks turning around and fighting the urge to bounce on the balls of her feet and redistribute the nervous energy bubbling up inside.

“Something like it,” Steve says. His mouth quirks up at the side in a smile that twists up something in Darcy’s chest. “Did you want…?” Steve waves a hand at his chest.

“Please,” Darcy says ignoring the heat warming her face.

“I was blank before the…Just before. When I woke up, there were words on my skin. Everything I knew was gone and there were words on my skin. Your words,” Steve says lifting his shirt up to reveal a surprisingly hairy chest and ‘I’m sorry, I was lost in my thoughts’ in Darcy’s own looping script on the pale gold skin over his ribs.

“Can I touch?” Darcy asks clutching her hands together. One thumb pressing into the meaty part between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand.

“Yeah.”

Darcy’s hand trembles a little as she reaches out to touch Steve’s chest and trace over her own writing. His skin twitches under her touch and she sinks her teeth into her bottom lip to keep from laughing. She traces over the _‘y’_ in _‘my’_ and Steve barks out a laugh, his hand, warm and calloused, covers hers holding her still. Her pulse skips over itself and she’s smiling so wide her face aches.

The mark isn’t over his heart but it’s close enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I used a couple of different sites for the Irish Gaelic in the story. Not google translate but that doesn’t mean they are perfectly correct. There were several different terms for ‘soulmate’ so I picked one and ran with it. The idiom I chose for Steve’s words just sorta screamed ‘Steve Rogers’ so I really couldn’t resist.
> 
> Mo anam cara - my soulmate
> 
> Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón.
> 
> (Iss min-ick a vrish bay-al din-eh a hrone.)
> 
> -Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose.


End file.
